Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Hey all... I'm heading out to Colorado tomorrow for several shows in Colorado Springs, Denver and Utah. The Denver and Utah gigs are school assemblies, but the Colorado Springs shows are at public libraries, so if any of you happen to live near there, please come out and see a show. Here are the dates:

I've got a pretty large pile of kids' music CDs that I've been sent but haven't featured here yet. In some cases, I've listened to the CD but haven't written anything yet, and other CDs I haven't even had a chance to listen to yet. I will try to at least listen to everything on this trip, and also try to catch up on writing a few posts on my days off. As I've said before, I can't guarantee that I'm going to feature everything that I receive, but I'll try to get to as much as I can. Whether I feature everything or not, I want to say that I really appreciate everything that I receive, and it's very cool to be able to hear so much of what's going on in the kids' music genre these days.

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My wife, Roseann, has been doing toony style graphics here and there over the years (for example, she did the pirate and cowboy to the right of my main website page), and she's starting to learn some basic animation movement. We did sort of a test animation for my song, "Snow Day" (a nice short song to start with!), and it turned out very cute and funny, so we went ahead and posted it to YouTube. You can see it below... (I think I'm going to have to buy her an actual animation program and a graphics tablet so she doesn't have to mouse-draw MS Paint pictures and sequence them in a video editing program anymore... That's also what we did for "The Elephant Song" video and wow, that is tedious!)

Monday, March 12, 2007

Hey, how would you like to be on the next Eric Herman album? All you need to do is record yourself, or your kids, or your dog yelling "Scat cat!" and send me the file, and I'll try to work it in to the final recording for the song "Scat Cat!" from my upcoming Snail's Pace album. If you need direction on how to do it, listen to this sample. (The tempo is 113 bpm and the words would come in on the second and third quarter notes of the measure.)

I need a man's part and a woman's part for different verses, but if your recording isn't used for one of those solo parts, then I should be able to be use it near the end of the song, where there is supposed to be a big crowd of people yelling that. It's probably not likely that you'll be able to pick your voice out among the big crowd of voices once I mix them all together for that part, but you can still honestly say, "Hey, that's me there!" and add it to your rock star resume.So if you have a microphone, record two or three takes of that phrase (careful not to overload it with the yelling) and send the file(s) to me at eric(at)butter-dog(dot)com in WAV/AIFF or highest possible quality MP3 format, please. Recordings should be completely dry, with no effects or normalizing. If you don't really have a microphone to record with, try your video camera. They often have decent microphones, and you'll just have to export the audio from the camera into your soundcard and capture it. To do that, you can use the Sound Recorder program that all Windows machines come with, or download the free Audacity audio program. (Feel free to ask if you need more help as far as recording, capturing and saving a sound file.)

Everyone who submits a recording will get a free download of the full song when it is released and a $1.00 discount for the Snail's Pace album. A free copy of the CD will go to the man and woman chosen for the solo parts.